Many devices are marked with serial numbers, identification codes, Quick Reference (“QR”) codes, or other identifiers to assist with identifying the device or a feature or characteristic of the device. This can assist with inventory management, supply chain management, and quality assurance management. Many forms of marking include providing the identifier mark on a surface of the device, wherein the identifier mark is the complete serial number or identification code. However, this requires reservation of otherwise usable space for placement and display of the identification code. Reserving space for identifier marks can be problematic for devices that are specifically designed to occupy a small volume of space. For instance, the desire to make electrical devices smaller in the field of modern electronics has led to the impetus to use as much space as possible on the device. The premium for usable space is especially prevalent on printed circuit boards (“PCBs”), and even more prevalent on miniaturized PCBs. The current trend for miniaturized electronic assemblies leaves very little to no space for identification markings e.g., labels, bar codes, human readable text, etc.). Thus, reserving space for a serial number or identification code can significantly limit the “miniaturization” efforts of the device, and even increase costs associated with producing and using the device.
Further, with the advent of information technology, there is an impetus to obtain more robust information from a data acquisition set and a data processing scheme. While a serial number or identification code can be used to access a host of data related to the characteristics of the device, the serial number or identification code only embodies one piece of identifying information. A user, or a system, must then reference another data store to look up the information associated with the identifying information. Thus, current marking technologies fail to provide a means to generate a plurality of identifying and other characteristic information from a marked device.
The present invention is directed toward overcoming one or more of the above-identified problems.